New environmental regulations on refrigerants have forced the refrigeration and air-conditioning industry to look for new refrigerants with low global warming potential (GWP).
Replacement refrigerants are being sought that have low GWP, no toxicity, non-flammability, reasonable cost and excellent refrigeration performance.
Fluoroolefins have been proposed as refrigerants alone or in mixtures. When used in a vapor compression system, any refrigerant has a tendency to leak from the system over time, as holes develop in the system. Especially where the refrigerant is a blend of different components, it would be desirable to know the composition of the refrigerant which remains in the system, in order to understand how much of each blend component would be needed to recharge the system. While systems are available for recharging systems which use known refrigerants which are not fluoroolefin based compositions, for instance, as disclosed in US 2004/0055317, to date, no system exists which is particularly useful in identifying the components of fluoroolefin compositions, which may be blends, and in determining the amount of the fluoroolefin components or other components in the blend which need to be added.